today's leftovers
-
5 Arduino Uno Alternatives You Might Want to Try - IoT Tech Trends
Too expensive? Too lacking? There’s a lot to be said with the official Arduino Uno design. If you’re looking for something that gives more bang for the buck, though, then here are five alternatives using the famous Arduino Uno’s form factor!
-
I’ve joined Vivaldi Technologies [Ed: Mastodon is Free software, but Vivaldi is proprietary; does Vivaldi hope that dabbling in Free software like this would give people false perceptions?]
On November 1st, I joined familiar faces from my days at Opera Software and new colleges at Vivaldi Technologies. I joined as a Quality Assurance Tester working on the Vivaldi web browser product for mobile and desktop.
I didn’t expect to ever work for a social media company. Two short weeks after I joined Vivaldi, it jumped on the decentralized social networking craze and launched a new Mastodon instance called Vivaldi Social.
-
What the fediverse (does/n't) solve
No matter how benevolent a dictatorship is, it's still a dictatorship, and subject to the dictator's whims. We must demand that the owners and leaders of tech platforms be fair and good – but we must also be prepared for them to fail at this, sometimes catastrophically.
That is, even if you trust Tim Cook to decide what apps you are and aren't allowed to install – including whether you are allowed to install apps that block Apple's own extensive, nonconsensual, continuous commercial surveillance of its customers – you should also be prepared for Cook to get hit by a bus and replaced by some alt-right dingleberry.
What happens next is a matter of technology and law. It's a matter of whether you have to give up your media and your apps and your data to escape the no-longer-benevolent dictatorship. It depends on whether the technology is designed to let you move those things, and whether the law protects you from tech companies, or whether it protects tech companies from you, by criminalizing jailbreaking, reverse engineering, scraping, etc.
-
Jonathan McDowell: Free Software Activities for 2022
There is a move to Bring Back Blogging and having recently sorted out my own FreshRSS install I am completely in favour of such a thing. RSS feeds with complete posts, for preference, not just a teaser intro sentence/paragraph.
It’s also a reminder to me that I should blog more, and what better way to start 2023 than with my traditional recap of my Free Software activities in 2022. For previous years see 2019, 2020 + 2021
[...]
Most of my contributions to Free software continue to happen within Debian.